Will Snowflake spark a cloud data warehouse price war?

If the biggest impediment to the Data Warehouse market growth was cost and hardware scalability limits, then the logjam has broken. And if the biggest boon to Hadoop adoption was commodity compute and storage economics, along with elastic scaling, then things may be more complicated now.

Cloud-based data warehousing (DW), based on cloud storage and cloud-based clusters of database virtual machines, makes DW much easier than it was on-premises. And now, Snowflake Computing, a cloud DW startup, has slashed storage prices, possibly making the economics as attractive as the logistics.

Show me the money here’s the lowdown: Snowflake’s terabyte/month storage costs are now $30 for “capacity” storage (sold on a contracted basis — down from $125) and $50 for “on-demand” storage (sold on a pay-as-you-go basis — down from $150).

Both price cuts are really big (76% and 67%, respectively). In fact, Snowflake says that it is essentially selling capacity storage at the same pricing customers would pay for Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service), on which Snowflake storage is based. And while the volume discount that Amazon gives to S3 customers is not being passed through, Snowflake says that is to keep pricing simple.

Provisioning gets easier tooIn addition to on-demand storage, Snowflake is now offering an On Demand version of its entire service. With it, customers can now skip past formal sales engagements, hit the Snowflake site, open an account, provide credit card information, provision resources and be off to the races.